marks of an influence that is easily traced to its source; Fuller, however, observed with broader and more penetrating view, and, as his works show, seems to have studied men less than principles, and to have been filled with admiration, not so much for particular practices as for the common and lofty spirit in which the greatest of the world’s painters labored.  The colorists and chiaroscurists, such as Titian on the one hand and Rembrandt on the other, seem to have impressed him particularly, and of all men Titian the most strongly, as many of his pictures testify, and as such glowing works as the Arethusa and the Boy and Bird unmistakably show.  Yet it was not in matter or in manner, but in the expression of a great truth, that the old masters most strongly affected him.  He felt at once, and grew to admire greatly, their repose and modesty, calm strength and undisturbed temper, and drew from them the important principle that true genius may be known by its confessing neither pride nor self-distrust.  The serenity of their style he sought at once to appropriate, and thereafter worked as much as possible in imitation of their evident purpose, striving simply to do his best, without any question of whether the result would please, or another’s effort be reckoned as greater than his own.  It became a governing principle with him never to seek to outdo any one, or to feel anything but pleasure at another’s success, for he was not a man who could fail to recognize the truth that envy is fatal to a fine mood in any labor.  Few artists, we may well believe, study the great art of the world in this spirit, or derive from it such a lesson.

On his return to America, he betook himself to his native town of Deerfield, to assume for a time the care of the ancestral farm, which the death of his father had placed in his hands.  He had returned from Europe full of inspired ideas, and was apparently ready to go on at once in new paths of labor; but the voice of duty seemed to him to call him away from his chosen life, and he obeyed its summons without hesitation.  Moreover, he loved the country and the family homestead, and may have perceived, also, that the condition of art in Boston and New York was not such as to encourage an original purpose, and that, if he was ever to gain success, he must develop himself in quiet, and aloof from the distracting influences of other methods and men.  It is easy to perceive, with the complete record of his life before us, that this experience of labor and thought upon the Deerfield farm, although at first sight forming an hiatus in his career, was really its most pregnant period, and that without it the Fuller who is now so much admired might have been lost to us, and the spirit that appears in his later works never have been awakened.  It is, indeed, a spirit that can find no congenial dwelling-place in towns, but makes its home in the fields and on the hillsides, to which the poet-painter, depressed but not cast down by his experience of life,